Five titles that inspired Emily Wilson’s translation of the "Odyssey"

Emily Wilson is Department Chair and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, holding the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities. Wilson attended Oxford University (Balliol College B.A. in Classics and Corpus Christi College M.Phil. in Renaissance English Literature) and Yale University (Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature). She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. She has published four books on ancient literature, philosophy and translation, an edited volume on tragedy, and many essays and articles, as well as verse translations of Seneca, Sophocles, Euripides and Homer.

For Vogue Wilson tagged five books that aided her translation of the Odyssey. One title on her list:

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

I’ve loved this book since I was a child. I’ve reread it many times. It is, like the Odyssey, a book about travel, identity, and a clever man’s journey away from one community and back to another. But primarily, I thought of LeGuin’s style, especially in that book, as one of many guiding lights as I considered and experimented with how to convey the vividness (enargeia in Greek) of Homeric poetry. Of course, LeGuin is writing prose, not metrical poetry, but there’s something both very beautiful, very plain/noble/rapid, and very Homeric about her style in this book. The sentences actually often have a beautiful rhythmicality to them: “This is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were made.”

Read about the other books on Wilson's list.

A Wizard of Earthsea is among four books that changed Mardi McConnochie, Maria Turtschaninoff's ten favorite feminist heroes in fiction, BBC.com Culture’s best children’s books ever published in English, five books that changed Gary Corby, and Lev Grossman's top five fantasy novels.

--Marshal Zeringue